Rem Koolhaas’s new Seattle Public Library has been praised to the skies. But David Dillon takes a second look: “As the rhetorical fog begins to lift, it’s clear that some of the praise was justified and some not. This is a dynamic civic building that bumps and grinds its way onto the downtown Seattle skyline with real panache. It reinvents and reinterprets many basic library functions, yet for all its adventurousness still manages to celebrate the book and reading. But it is not as coolly efficient as its boosters claim, and at street level it is a disaster, thumbing its nose at traditional urbanism in favor of gratuitous form making.”